


a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story

by Northland



Category: L M Montgomery - Emily series
Genre: F/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 05:41:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northland/pseuds/Northland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I shall always end my stories happily. I don't care whether it's 'true to life' or not. It's true to life as it should be and that's a better truth than the other. -- Emily Byrd Starr</p>
            </blockquote>





	a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VegaOfTheLyre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VegaOfTheLyre/gifts).



_I shall always end my stories happily. I don't care whether it's 'true to life' or not. It's true to life as it_ should _be and that's a better truth than the other._ \-- Emily Byrd Starr

Many people later insisted the summer of 1914 had been the most perfect season they remembered; some of them were likely influenced by the contrast with what came after to heighten its remembered idyll. Emily Byrd Kent, nee Starr, knew that the summer she married Teddy would have been perfect in any year.

They were married from New Moon on a peerless day of early summer. Her aunts Elizabeth and Laura were determined to give Emily a proper send-off, not like the hasty affair they'd been prepared to countenance when she was engaged to Dean Priest. The Kents might be unknown in Blair Water, but Frederick Kent was a good boy (Elizabeth could not bring herself to give him the designation of a man yet), a rising artist, and -- most importantly -- ought to know what was due a Murray of New Moon who'd done him the honour of consenting to be his wife. So the aunts scrubbed and baked and sewed for weeks, while Cousin Jimmy sat on the dairy steps and composed his wedding gift of poetry.

It was a very quiet service in the old-fashioned parlour. Besides the Murray relatives, only Ilse and Perry, Dr. Burnley, and Teddy's good friend Lorne Healey from Montreal were there. Janet Royal sent an outrageous fur wrap all the way from an exclusive New York shop as her gift; only Ilse's turquoise bridesmaid dress rivalled it for causing talk among the Murray clan.

Cousin Jimmy gave the bride away, defeating Uncle Oliver for the privilege with the backing of his sisters. Emily's flushed cheeks out-crimsoned the bunch of simply tied peonies from Jimmy's garden she held in her hands. Her old tabby Daff twined around their ankles as the new husband and wife kissed. And then they all sat to a feast such as Elizabeth and Laura had never equalled -- and sat outside.

For Emily had done the impossible; she had persuaded her aunts to set the table for the wedding dinner outside. Uncle Oliver thought it a silly fad, Aunt Ruth sniffed, but the groaning board halfway appeased them. And Emily, with her beloved garden and trees for fellow guests, and the Wind Woman singing epithalamia in the pine barrens, was quite simply the happiest woman in the world. Teddy sat beside her, his breath catching every time she turned her head and the pearl pins he had given her as a wedding gift gleamed in the shadowy waves of her hair, or the wind brushed the curls on the nape of her neck.

And then, as the evening star shone out, the two of them walked over the hill, opened the door of their house -- Disappointed no more -- and entered in as man and wife.

-*-

"Toast, bacon, and marmalade."

Those may not be the words every bride dreams of hearing on the morning after her wedding, but Emily woke to that murmured phrase in her ear as if it were poetry. She looked at her husband -- husband! what a satisfying word to use, when the sound was so ugly of itself -- leaning over her and laughed. "Were we ten when we vowed to live here together and eat that for breakfast every morning? I thought you'd forgotten."

"Never." Teddy tickled her nose with a strand of her loosened hair. "Do you smell it?"

Emily pushed the coverlet back and sat up, sniffing. "Have you been in my kitchen?"

"Yours, wife? Since yesterday, there's no yours and mine, only ours."

"Then that shirt is mine," Emily answered, "and I'll trouble you to give it back to me this instant."

The toast was eaten some while later, cold and tough as it was, but the bacon proved inedible -- to human tastes, at any rate; Daff was happy to consume it.

-*-

That summer passed for Emily as though she were in a fairy hill. She knew that the world's time marched on, the lives and works of men continued, but inside their charmed circle of two each day and night seemed infinite.

Teddy and Emily were not only learning and teaching each other the secrets all newly married couples discover; they were busy with work, as well. Warehams had asked for another story of the Applegarths to follow the unexpected popularity of _The Moral of the Rose_. Emily herself felt as though she had not done with all of those busy folk her pen had created; they still lived and clamoured for attention behind her eyes.

So Emily wrote, and Teddy sketched and painted her in a frenzy, as though he were driven to capture her on canvas. And so it was that the storm gathering in Europe broke over them completely unawares, though the mutter of it approaching had been building for some time.

-*-

September 12, 1914  
Camp Valcartier, Quebec

Emily love,

I won't insult you by quoting Lovelace or mouthing about duty. Leaving you on that platform was the hardest thing I have ever done, and yet I had to do it. You know why.

This is only an interruption. I'll come back to you -- I _will_ \-- but even so, if my life were the price of the last three months I would pay and consider it cheap. Ninety days of perfect happiness is more than most are given...

-*-

Writing was the thing that saved Emily during those first awful months of the war. Elizabeth and Laura clucked over the shadows under her eyes and made her drink endless cups of warm milk, but they didn't know how much worse it was on the nights she couldn't write herself out and collapse into a restless sleep.

The No-Longer-Disappointed House was empty again. Not for long, Emily promised herself; but as much as she loved their house, she needed company in these days. Going back to live at New Moon meant aunts and Jimmy there to keep her from loneliness -- and to read the lists of casualties. They thought she didn't know that every day Jimmy made a special trip to Dr Burnley's or to the store in Blair Water to fetch the Charlottetown papers. Emily was grateful. If -- anything were to happen, it would be a loving voice that told her.

Three times in her life Emily had somehow pierced the hazy border between the waking world and elsewhere, and each time it had been a matter of life and death that called her. An old Highland woman had once told her she had the "second sight." Emily herself had no explanation; she only knew that she dreaded sleeping to dream of some inescapable danger to Teddy. Once, before they were married, a vision of her had prevented Teddy from sailing on a ship that sank with no survivors. Surely this time she would not be able to change anything, not with so many thousands of men and machines ground between the millstones of fate in the trenches of France. But then, what if she _could_ save Teddy? She didn't know whether to wish for her uncanny gift to manifest or not.

So she ate little and slept less, and submerged herself in the world that sprang from her pen. At least there she reigned supreme, and could order all things to end happily.

-*-

Daff was old and crotchety, disinclined to leave his comfortable new home and return to New Moon where younger cats now ruled the barn. He had taken to returning to the No-Longer-Disappointed House whenever he could; how he got in Emily never knew, but at least once a week she had to hunt him out.

On a damp afternoon in April she found the elderly cat again in his favourite spot by the hearth, curled into a ball the colour of the cold ashes in the grate. Emily sat down beside him and hugged her knees, looking about at the shrouded furniture that loomed like icebergs in the dim house. She kept her eyes resolutely away from the old gazing ball which had once entrapped her into a vision, but she could not prevent them from closing. Daff's familiar snoring purr, the homey things surrounding her, weeks of tense wakefulness -- everything lulled her into a listless doze.

The dove-grey paper on the walls trembled and blurred into a mist tinged with sickly yellow. Somehow she was now insubstantial herself, floating in the mist, shuddering at its clammy touch on her skin. Dark shapes blundered through it and stirred the fog with wind-milling arms. Emily glimpsed a man's face distorted by pain into a bestial mask, his mouth streaming blood. Her stinging eyes flowed with tears. Where was Teddy? He must be somewhere in this choking murk.

A patch of darkness below her drew her attention. She pushed closer. A man lay on the ground, his uniform nearly indistinguishable from the mud his cheek was pressed into: Teddy. His dark hair covered one eye. The other stared up at her blindly. A wet crimson stain surrounded a torn hole in his leg.

"Teddy!" Emily screamed, but her voice seemed to dissolve in the fog. She hovered over him, frantically clutching at his shoulders with hands as strong as smoke. In desperation she leaned down and pressed her insubstantial mouth against his cold and chapped lips, willing her breath to flow into him.

He blinked. "Emily?" His voice rasped; he turned his head away from the mud and curled around racking coughs from the depths of his chest. The fog swirled again, pulling Emily away. She grabbed at Teddy's arms, his belt, but could not anchor herself. His dark head disappeared into the mist.

The yellow-grey clouds surrounded Emily again; she did not know where she was or how to return. She sobbed aloud in terror, once, and pushed her cold hands against her mouth to hold it in. If she began to scream now, she would never stop. Could one be lost in this ghostly borderland? And what would happen if she never found her way back to the hearth where one part of her waited?

Then a familiar presence wrapped its warmth around her ankle. "Daff!" His grey tabby fur melted into the fog so well that he was invisible, but she stooped to run her hand down his back, and he arched into it, purring. He twisted between her legs and pressed against one purposefully. "Do you know the way home then, Daff? Show me." Stumbling, coughing in the acrid air that caught at even her disembodied breath, Emily followed her soft-footed guide for a measureless time.

Emily's heart jumped in her chest, and she felt the solidity of flesh settle around her again. She gasped in a long draught of clean air and opened her eyes to the prosaic front room of her home. Her legs were shaking with cold and cramp from sitting on the flagstone hearth. Daff lay beside her, unmoving.

Emily stroked him, shocked by how insubstantial the body seemed with his large personality missing. She leaned her head against the mantel's fluted sidepiece and went on smoothing the inert fur absently. How old had Daffy been? Full of days for a cat, surely. She remembered arguing with Ilse over his absurd name when he was just a conglomeration of fluff with unopened eyes. She didn't cry; tears seemed useless.

Emily sat there with Daff until Cousin Jimmy, looking in on the way from bringing the cows in for the evening milking, found her. "Come along, puss," he coaxed, gently lifting her. "We'll find a place in the garden for old Daff to rest, and I'll lay him there tonight. You need to get outside a cup of tea before you freeze." She let him lead her back to New Moon, unresisting, though her eyes still saw a grimy mist over everything.

The next week the name "Priv. Frederick Kent, wounded" appeared in the casualty lists in the Charlottetown papers. Emily read it with no surprise, knowing already what had happened. Nor did the official telegram following tell her anything new, except for the fact that Teddy had been sent to hospital in London to convalesce.

At least he will be safe now, thought Emily, and was bitterly ashamed.

-*-

Emily's chronicler shall pass swiftly over the next few months of her life, and Teddy's. They were not without danger to him, or strain to her; but in her innermost heart Emily felt that she -- and Daff -- had preserved Teddy so that he could return safely.

And he did. On a frost-bitten day of January 1917, his ship landed in Halifax harbour, and Emily was waiting there to warm him and bring him home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Stultiloquentia for plotbunnies & handholding and to West for superspeed beta.
> 
> The title comes from _The Last Unicorn_ by Peter S. Beagle.


End file.
